F=ma, the Inverse-Square Law, and Other Sound Principles that Don’t Seem to Hold Up (Part 1)

Think of the biggest thing you can think of. Is it a giant skyscraper? A mountain? Maybe planet Earth itself? Sure there are bigger things but these are pretty big. Now think about what it would take to build one of these things.  The sky scraper gets hauled into place by a nearly continuous stream of trucks then assembled by skilled trades people into an enormously ordered heap of concrete metal and glass.  The mountain took even more time and even more relentless work to build it up.  Either by volcanic eruptions transporting countless tons of molten rock high above the surface or crashing continental plates buckling and heaving already hardened crust miles and miles into the sky, the mountain is huge and way out of place from an energy perspective. Finally, Earth. 4.5 billion years of cosmic coalescence culminating in core, crust, crustaceans, and the Creole people (among a few other things). This brings us to the first Principle that doesn’t seem to hold up.

F=ma is the mathematical expression of Newton’s Second Law of Motion which shows the relationship between force (F), mass (m) and acceleration (a). Through the 2^nd law Newton basically explained that if you want to move something big you have to push harder than if it was small, or if you want something to speed up fast you have to push it harder than if you want it to speed up slow, or if you want to hit something hard a big stick will work better but it will be harder to get it going, or any combination or alternate application of these obvious but important realizations.

Newton was a genius (From a previous post you’ll know that I don’t use the term lightly) but his 2^nd law doesn’t seem to hold up to Matthew 17:20. Jesus told his disciples that they could move mountains with even a fractional portion of faith. Faith, not force, to move the mass of a mountain. Newton was a genius but not God. Why can’t Newton stand up to scripture? Or it could be asked why can’t scripture stand up to Newton? Are faith in the Word of God and faith in Newton’s Laws mutually exclusive?

This is a simple example from a big category of apparent incongruities between Scripture and Science. We could ask these questions for days but are they the right questions to ask?  Over the last decade I’ve asked myself how I can be confident in science and scripture and I feel now like I’m in a good place. However, again I’m faced with a communication problem. How can I tell a story that I’m living but don’t fully understand myself. A good starting place was accepting that I not only don’t understand, I won’t understand.